Tele Atlas signs a strategic agreement with Cadtech to cover North Africa.

Tele Atlas announced the signing of a strategic agreement with Cadtech, a Moroccan company specialising in geographical information systems and geolocalization applications, to enable the development of digital maps for Morocco and the North African region. Through the agreement, Morocco will be the first country in the region to be connected directly with Tele Atlas’ European digital map databases, allowing navigation from any point in Europe to this country.

Demonstrating its commitment to consistently enhance and expand its digital map offerings for its partners, including manufacturers of navigation systems and mobile phones, Tele Atlas will work with Cadtech to connect digital maps of Europe and Morocco, a North African country which is currently experiencing very strong economic development.

Through this collaboration between two major industry players, the first version of the database, which will be designed to deliver first-rate GPS navigation services such as personal navigation devices (PND), onboard GPS systems and geolocalization services for the Moroccan market, is scheduled to be available in Q2 2008.

All large towns and significant points of interest will be integrated in the navigation databases. The first version will represent coverage of approximately 70,000 kilometres, with five Moroccan towns included: Casablanca, Fez, Marrakech Rabat, and Tangiers, and will include 1,600 POIs. Additional towns and POIs will be included in subsequent versions.

According to Jack Reinelt, COO & Managing Director of Tele Atlas Europe, Middle East and Africa, this new partnership marks an important new stage for the development of Tele Atlas in North Africa, “It is clear to Tele Atlas that Morocco and the North African region have excellent growth potential and represent a strong business opportunity in the coming years. Also, given the proximity to the European continent we wanted to extend our high quality map coverage into this region quickly so that our partners can build this capability into their products. With this agreement, Morocco will enter the digital navigation era and we envision this will be a facilitating factor in its economic development”.